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Show The Paper That Dares To Take A Stand February 6, 1975 The Utah Independent Page Tanks For 11 Asking by William P. Hoar REPRINTED FROM THE REVIEW OF THE NEWS Americas already understrength tank inventory has been reduced by 10 percent since the Yom Kippur War of 1973. This vital armor has been shipped abroad for the use of foreigners. Primarily the Israelis. We have stripped ourselves of two years of tank production, and yet Secretary of Defense James Schle singer has approved shipment of an additional 495 tanks, including 1 1 1 of our main battle tanks in the M60 Series. These are our prime asset combat vehicles, with the diesel engines and 105mm guns (or better) necessary to deal effectively on the battlefield with current Soviet tanks. Assistant Secretary of the Army Harold Brownman admits that our arsenal of prime asset tanks is drastically low. He acknowledges that we now have less than half of the M60s the U.S. Army requires to meet our defense needs. And, according to the Army Times for December 4, 1974, the Army is now producing only forty M60 tanks a month while Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is giving them away at a rate. The Pentagon informs us that the Army is making an extensive examination in the hope of greatly increasing production of the M60s. It has, however, encountered a serious problem. According to Arthur Mendolia, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Installations and Logistics: The problem here has been that 60-a-mon- What does the Army plan to do? It hopes to salvage hundreds of unusable gasoline-powere- d M48 Patton Series t Congressman Les Aspin Official sources state that the current capons inventory of the U.S.S.R. is considerably larger than ours. But, based on performance in the Middle East war, Defense still claims our main battle tanks are generally superior to the Soviet system. Given the rate at which we are being stripped of what few we produce, this is hardly reassuring. Certainly there is a legitimate question concerning whose defense should be provided by our taxes and our Defense Department. The State De- tanks built in the Fifties by fitting them with more powerful armaments and new diesel engines. Currently it has thousands of these unserviceable 90mm M48 tanks that are being used primarily for Reserve training. The problem is that according to Assistant Army Secretary Brownman these will not reliably defeat Soviet armor except at close range. Even when upgraded the converted M48A5s will not be as good as the M60s that we are so freely providing to others. And what are the Soviets doing partment became amazingly secretive when we inquired how many tanks we th the supply situation of certain vital tank components, which involve metal castings, has become increasingly tight. The Assistant Secretary identified as a cause of this shortage the new environmental standards demanded for foundries by the government. He noted that a number have gone out of business, citing the ecology regulations as being partially responsible. Indeed, sources within the industry inform us that from 200 to 300 foundries a year have been shut down in the last several years. So serious is the situation, according to a Materiel Acquisition spokes- man at the Department of Defense, that the Armys only current source x for tank armor is the Foundry in East Chicago, Indiana. The spokesman said he hoped Birdsboro, Pennsylvania, will be reopened soon, but added that it must first find a way to meet the expensive standards of the Environmental Protection Agency. A spokesman for the House Committee on Armed Services confirmed for us the possibility that the second source at Birdsboro will be reopened, and expressed concern that the Army is very low on tanks. Nearly $86 million in reprogramming authority has been approved by the Committee to increase output from the Kippur schedule of a thirty month, past the current rate of forty a month, to 103 tanks per month by 1978. Contrast this in the face of the emergency with the fact that a single plant in Michigan in 1942 produced 896 tanks a month. Blaw-Kno- armor-productio- n pre-Yo- m In their volume, Kissinger On The Couch (Arlington House), Admiral Chester Ward and Phyllis Schlafly note the just-releas- ed strange appointment of James Schlesinger as Secretary of Defense after a short tenure as boss of C.I.A., where he caused the removal of hundreds of They observe: Without the unique diversion of Watergate to distract Resident Nixon, not even Henry Kissinger's unprecedented power could have accomplished this because Schlesinger was a career-lon- g protege of Daniel Ellsberg, all the way from Harvard to RAND." ts. Our M60 tank inventory is under half-strengt- while we worry about immaculate air and the color of our fireplugs? They are thousands of tanks to our hundreds. Dr. Malcolm R. Currie, Director of Defense Research and Engineering, described the armor threat in Senate Hearings on the Budget for Fiscal Year 1975: Not only do the Warsaw Pact forces have numerical superiority over NATO in tanks, but they are also modernizing mass-produci- ng this tank inventory with the 2 and the new Ml 970 battle tanks. Additionally, the Pact continues to produce tanks at a higher rate than the NATO nations. You can bet the Soviets are not mass producing for defense against invasion by Luxembourg. The United States is not standing completely still, of course. It just seems that way because of failure to produce the vitally needed M70 tank after expenditure on its design of millions of dollars and thirteen years of planning. In 1971, with the research and development done (and available for theft by the Soviets), we just gave up on ever producing the modern M70s. Now the U.S. Army Materiel Command informs us that plans for construction of a completely new tank, the XM-1- , are on schedule. That one will supposedly have special armor that will make it twice as survivable as our M60s, and will be twice as accurate while on the move. deHowever, a decision for velopment of the XM-- 1 will not be and there is slim made until assurance that the XM-- 1 will be built, either, since the Army must contend with such demagogues as T-6- full-sca- mid-197- anti-Defen- le 6, se h, but still shipped to foreigners. had sent to Israel. It neednt have bothered. In testimony before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee in June of 1974, Defense Secretary Schlesinger stated: I would point out that in the last 7 months we have drawn down our own tank inventories by something on the order of 600 tanks for the Israelis and that is a very substantial fraction of our modern tank inventory. According to Secretary of the. Army Howard Callaway, our transshipped combat equipment came from prepositioned contingency stocks and from active forces in Europe, as well as from depot stocks and combat units in the United States. This resulted in units from which major items were withdrawn, dropping to lower levels of readiness. Some critical shortages were generated We are cutting into our own military stockpile in numerous ways. In addition to the tank drain, our government has reportedly sent nearly half of our newly developed T.O.W. antitank missiles to the Israelis. The T.O.W. (Tube-launche- Optically-tracke- d, d, missile can an knock out enemy tank at two miles. Yet, with our tank forces outnumbered by the Soviets by 1 5,000 to Wire-guide- d) 20,000 tanks, foreigners (including Lebanon!) have been given a higher priority than our own military. We sell such The vulnerability of the Soviet tank is increased because its fuel cells are mounted outside. Nevertheless, according to Wird and Schlafly in Kissinger On The Couch, in the military competition for supremacy in tanks, the Soviets now probably have some 15.000 to 20,000 more than the United States. More important, theirs are newer than ours and outgun us. Their 2 model is at least five years newer than our standard tanks and is in continuing mass production. They have attained an era of tank plenty that has permitted them to add, in the last months of 1972 and early 1973, more than 3.000 new to their already massive tank forces in East Germany and Czechoslovakia. These Soviet 2 tanks were the main force of the Arab surprise attack against Israel in October 1973. T-6- T-6- When such environmental protection hurts national defense, one wonders about our governments priorities. On a related but lighter theme, consider the dilemma of the Holston Defense Corporation. Since it operates on an Army installation, Holston Is fireplugs must be yellow as specified by Army regulations. However, O.S.H.A. contends that as a private company Holston must have red fireplugs. What to do? T-6- 2s T-6- 2 missiles, according to U.S. News World Report for January 20, 1975, to fourteen nations and give them away to three others, but T.O.W.S are in such short supply for American forces that the Marine Corps wont receive its first 100 TOW launchers until December. That is next December! This sort of thing is, if not treason, utterly outrageous. And it is common. Consider the F4 aircraft. Syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert of Novak disclosed in Air Force 1974 that the today is short of the small percentage of F4 the mainstay of fighter aircraft that is equipped Israels air force with extremely costly electronic counter measures (ECM). A high percentage of the very small number of these aircraft we had went to Israel, a Israel Pentagon official told us. comes first. And, after all, there is detente. We are told the Soviets are now the friend of all humanity. Do we really need to be reminded that the constant threat of war is in the interest of the Soviet Union, regardless of the meaningless pronouncements of its propagandists concerning peace? It is a fact so obvious that even Secretary Schlesinger has admitted: Soviet actions during the October 1973 Middle East War show that detente is not the only , and in certain circumstances not the primary , policy interest of the USSR. The immediate Soviet arms shipments to Egypt and Syria at the outset of hostilities, the deployment of mid-Novemb- er - SCUD nuclear-capabl- e missile launchers , the peremptory Soviet note to the United States Government implying the possibility of direct Soviet military intervention with ground and air forces, and the forward deployment of sizeable Soviet naval over 90 Soviet ships in forces the Mediterranean at the height of the hostilities and smaller naval forces in the Indian Ocean provided another lesson in Soviet willingness to take risks with world peace. Since the Yom Kippur War, the Soviets have resupplied Syria heavily, with American intelligence estimating that by April or May all of Syrias losses will have been replaced. We will have done the same for Israel, and by spring both forces are expected to be in peak combat condition. The mandates of the United Nations g troops on the Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights expire on April 24th and May 31st respectively. The U.N. Secretary-Genera- l has openly expressed doubt that the mandates for the tiny 5,750-maforce will be extended. Meanwhile, the military buildup continues. The Soviets reportedly have provided Syria with more than 1 ,000 2 tanks, 300 warplanes, missiles capable of hitting Tel Aviv and other cities, and other heavy arms. Furthermore, Israeli Defense Minister Shimon Peres has stated that several thousand Soviet Army personnel, Some with their families, have been stationed in Syria and are operating, among other things, a missile system around Damascus. The C.I.A. has acknowledged such a Russian presence. In fact according to the Syrian Communist Party leader Khaled Bakdash (as so-call- peace-keepin- n T-6- Continued on page 12 ed |